Sunday, May 01, 2016

Reads for May 1st

Obituary: Noted Jesuit priest and major figure of the anti-Vietnam War movement Daniel Berrigan, 94, has died. He and his brother Philip were among the most prominent people who were against the war in the late 1960s-early 1970s.

The obituaries of his two brothers, Philip and Jerry, the latter less well-known but was involved in various peace movements, are at the link.

At Le Moyne College in Syracuse, where he was a popular professor of New Testament studies from 1957 to 1963, Father Berrigan formed friendships with his students that other faculty members disapproved of, inculcating in them his ideas about pacifism and civil rights. (One student, David Miller, became the first draft-card burner to be convicted under a 1965 law.)

Father Berrigan was effectively exiled in 1965, after angering the hawkish Cardinal Francis Spellman in New York. Besides Father Berrigan’s work in organizing antiwar groups like the interdenominational Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam, there was the matter of the death of Roger La Porte, a young man with whom Father Berrigan said he was slightly acquainted. To protest American involvement in Southeast Asia, Mr. La Porte set himself on fire outside the United Nations building in November 1965.

Soon, according to Father Berrigan, “the most atrocious rumors were linking his death to his friendship with me.” He spoke at a service for Mr. La Porte, and soon thereafter the Jesuits, widely believed to have been pressured by Cardinal Spellman, sent him on a “fact-finding” mission among poor workers in South America. An outcry from Catholic liberals brought him back after only three months, enough time for him to have been radicalized even further by the facts he had found.

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Not surprising to me the fetishists are using young people with confusion about their sex and suffering from depression as a way to destroy women's rights to their own spaces.

I can't believe the whole goddamned thing. We as women live in very dangerous times. The parents belong in jail for child abuse.

I hope for the day this quackery is finally marginalized and the surgeries and hormone treatments outlawed as human rights abuse.
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It is good news that the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge is now pretty much back to normal, with some changes, after those idiots occupied it last winter and then left in shame and embarrassment.
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